I have attempted to read this book a few times and have each time, found the beginning slow. I have recently decided that I will either read the books on my bookshelf or let them go and gave this one, another shot. The story was sufficient, the writing ok - I did actually finish it. My major complaint was the ending. It was a disappointing withdraw from the growth of the main character. ( )

This is a book about a 40 year old woman. I will turn 40 by and by, and am therefore doing my literary research. But shit, I don't get this woman at all. While the reasons for her leaving are spelt out, I still don't feel they were adequate. Perhaps the character of her husband wasn't drawn strongly enough, but he didn't seem to deserve the abandonment. Leaving your kids, even if they are teenagers, is something I couldn't identify with at all.

Still, if our MC had simply got a part-time job and requested that they go somewhere else for their annual holiday for a change all might have been good, but that wouldn't have made for a very good novel. So I'll forgive the unlikely premise. Especially since Anne Tyler's characterisation is so strong that she can almost write anything and manages to make it quite likely indeed.

The main point of interest in this story is the analogy to Delia and a household cat: Like a cat, she abandons her young as soon as they're 'weaned' and like a typical cat, she abandons one family on a whim and settles down quickly with another. Like a cat, she listens to people's problems without interjecting with her own. This was interesting.

The problem is that the characters in this were so damn unlikeable, which is fine, I suppose, except in the end I stopped trying so hard to keep everyone's names straight and genuinely didn't care whether Delia went back to her husband or not. I got sick of hearing about her ankle, that's for sure. I would read another from this author, mainly because I thought Digging To America (a later work) was much better. ( )

I never know how an Anne Tyler novel is going to end. She has a way of trailing infinite possibilities behind her advancing prose. This is part of what keeps me reading her books. Usually I'm content enough when I arrive at her final destination. However, the ending to this one infuriated me, causing acute pain and a sense of betrayal. The pain and betrayal came from having liked the book a lot up until then, and from my sympathy toward the main character. Sometimes as a reader one sees things quite differently from how the writer sees those same things. Unfortunately, sometimes this difference isn't fully revealed until the very end of a book. But I don't want to think about it for the length of time required to write any more details, nor do I want to hide the review because of spoilers.

In the case of this rating, ending trumps all: 2 stars for the ending, 4 stars for the rest of the book. ( )

Cordelia Grinstead is a wife and mother to three children. Her husband Sam, a doctor, recently suffered a heart attack, (though Delia, as she is commonly known, refers to it as chest pains). At or about the same time her father died after Delia had cared for him for some time in her own home.Her children are all teenagers and have become more independent and less reliant on their mother. Delia’s husband has become distant and less attentive. Delia has becoming unsure of her role as a mother, a wife and in the world in general.While on the annual family holiday with her family and her sisters, Eliza and Linda and the latter’s children, Delia asks a young man who was working on the holiday home to drive her to a place she knows nothing of. She asks the young man to stop at a small town and there she begins a new life with only the possessions she is wearing and what is within her tote bag.On the surface, The Ladder of Years appears to be a run of the mill novel about a middle aged woman going through the proverbial mid-life crisis. This appearance seems justified when you throw stroppy, mumbling, uncommunicative teenagers and an inattentive older husband in to the mix.However, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anne Tyler has written a novel that defies cliché, stereotype and one’s preconceived ideas of what a woman’s mid-life crisis looks like. A clever choice on Anne Tyler’s part was to write the book in the third person. It would have been easier to have written the novel in the first person and allow us the reader to get a better and easier understanding of Delia’s motives and thoughts on her behaviour. But writing the novel in the third person puts the reader at a slight distance from Delia so making it harder to empathize or sympathize with her. It makes the reader have to work that bit harder in getting to understand Delia and her reasoning and in this process makes the reading of the novel that much more satisfying.I also believe that writing in the third person allows many male readers to follow Delia’s character without feelings of being uncomfortable in their male skin than had the novel been written in the first person. It is possible that many male readers would have found it uncomfortable or off putting to follow the character had they had access to her inner thoughts and feelings. By writing in the third person male readers are allowed to keep their distance and not made to feel that they inhabit a female persona. All the characters within The Ladder of Years are rounded three dimensional people and as a reader I felt that I knew and understood each of the novel’s inhabitants by the end of the book. This knowing and understanding is from the perspective of a friend of the family and not as a family member. By this I mean that as much as I believed I knew the character’s motives and reasons for what they did and how they lived I still couldn’t be sure I was getting the full picture. This I believe was intentional on the author’s part. I believe that Anne Tyler was trying to communicate that we never fully know someone else even when they are family. There are times in our lives when we feel like we are an outsider within our own family group looking in through a window that becomes more opaque as time moves on.Anne Tyler’s novel is a well crafted moving and at times funny novel that will not disappoint any reader, even the male of the species.

One of the lines near the end of the book reads, "It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded." These few words are basically your entire plot, but the idea of the book wasn't what bothered me, and the flighty, unthinking characters weren't a hindrance to my reading. What stopped me from desperately clinging to this book in an effort to consume the whole thing at once was, in fact, the whole thing itself. The writing is mediocre, the characters are annoying and the plot is a good concept but hardly goes anywhere, even as it comes full circle in its own way. I don't mind reading books that are more like life than fiction, I don't mind reading about someone wanting to make a fresh start for whatever reason, but I do want a reason. The entire book is centered around a mother who leaves her family one day, just because she wanted to walk, then she just decided to get into a car going somewhere, then she decided to get out, then she decided to get an apartment, then a job... All in a few hours of each other, almost all in her bathing suit and a bathrobe. If she had been running from abuse or some other desperate situation, I could have understood, but to simply have a wishy-washy feeling of disliking the way the kids and husband brush her off (that is what older teens do, for the most part, it's made very clear in the book) and then discover you are miles away and you just don't happen to be turning around? I felt like the non-committal events were the author's way of justifying why everything was happening, though they were also ignoring what was happening.

To be fair, the entire book so mirrors the family that you almost want to call it a stroke of genius. Who doesn't remember the description of someone in their own family? Someone who doesn't care. Who can't be bothered to keep the consistency of the plot or characters? The book itself. I can't call this book bad and I can't call it frustrating. I find myself at a total loss to call it anything other than what it is. A book that is twenty chapters long and contains text of some variety or another. ( )

Wikipedia in English (1)

BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, "walking away from it all" is not a premeditated act but an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimagined life. . . .

BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, "walking away from it all" is not a premeditated act but an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimagined life. . . .

"TYLER DETAILS DELIA'S ADVENTURE WITH GREAT SKILL. . . . As so often in her earlier fiction, [she] creates distinct characters caught in poignantly funny situations. . . . Tyler writes with a clarity that makes the commonplace seem fresh and the pathetic touching."--The New York Times

A runaway wife leaves one domestic situation, only to fall into another. She is Delia Grinstead, 40, of Baltimore, the wife of a physician and mother of three. One day she decides she's had enough of being invisible, moves to another town and gets herself a job--caring for a boy whose mother has abandoned the family. By the author of Saint Maybe.… (more)